Australia’s social cohesion is proving resilient against financial pressures and anxiety about Middle East unrest but fraying around the issue of immigration, with almost half the population believing it is too high, according to detailed new research.
The Scanlon Foundation Research Institute’s annual survey, Mapping Social Cohesion, measures participants’ sense of belonging, worth, inclusion and justice, political participation, and acceptance and rejection, to form a cohesion index and produce a numerical benchmark that can be compared year on year.
It involved almost 8,000 randomly selected participants, further surveying another 229 targeted participants – the latter mostly overseas-born Australians.
As a companion to the wider survey, the foundation also produces an extra qualitative study, this year based on interviews with 45 people and focused on polarisation.
The 2024 overall social cohesion index score was 78 – the same as in 2023 but still at its lowest since the survey began in 2007. The score has been steadily declining since 2008.
The smaller qualitative study produced a picture of Australians divided on current political, economic and environmental issues and with older Australians, in particular, feeling “that Australia has changed”.
The survey found financial pressures remained “stubbornly common”, with 41% of respondents describing themselves as “just getting by” – a figure that has risen 10 percentage points since 2021.
Produced in conjunction with the Australian Multicultural Foundation and the Australian National University, the survey found support for multiculturalism remains mostly positive, with 85% agreeing it has been good for Australia generally and 82% saying it is good for the economy.
But while this is still stronger than before the Covid-19 pandemic, it is down from 89% in 2023.
The respondents sent mixed messages on immigration. While 71% agreed that accepting migrants from many countries made Australia stronger and 83% disagreed that Australia should reject migrants based on ethnicity, race or religion, almost half – 49% – said immigration was too high, up sharply from 33% last year and also higher than the pre-pandemic 41% recorded in 2019.
There are also signs of shifting attitudes towards major faith groups, some of which the survey report attributes to the impact of Middle East tensions. Attitudes were distinctly more negative than last year towards Christians, Buddhists, Jewish people, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims.
Arguably reflecting the reported rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia, only 30% reported “somewhat positive” sentiment towards people of Jewish faith, down from 38% last year, and only 18% felt positively towards Muslims, down from 24%. For Hindus and Sikhs, positive sentiment had fallen from 33% to 26%, for Christians from 42% to 37% and for Buddhists from 50% to 44%.
More than one in three, or 34%, reported a negative attitude to Muslims, but this is still lower than in each of the years 2018-2020, when negativity peaked at 40%. Negative attitudes towards Jewish people are less common but have increased, from 9% in 2023 to 13% this year.
The lead author of this year’s survey report, Dr James O’Donnell, said he had expected to find that social media use might be fuelling polarisation of attitudes including towards faith groups.
“In fact, the social media users were less likely to have a negative attitude towards Jewish and Muslim people, irrespective of where they were on the political spectrum,” he said.
O’Donnell was also surprised the overall results on social cohesion were not worse.
“You can certainly see there’s some challenges there,” O’Donnell told Guardian Australia. “But among everything that’s gone on in the last 12 months you might have expected a decline further in social cohesion. But, in fact, it’s been stable. Perhaps this is speaking to a resilience.”
A senior lecturer with the ANU’s school of demography, O’Donnell took heart from the immigration findings in Australia, compared with the divisiveness of the issue in the US and Europe.
“We’re facing the same sort of pressures, but in some ways we’re doing quite well,” he said. “And so you get so much tumult around the world … that’s kind of tied in with the sort of economic and cost-of-living pressures quite clearly and we see some of those cost-of-living pressures here.
“We have taken a little bit of a hit in terms of that kind of support for migration and diversity, but it’s still quite strong and it’s not such a divisive and such a polarising issue in Australia at the moment.”
O’Donnell said the proportion of people saying the level of immigration is too high was the biggest change in the survey results over the past two years. It was 24% in 2022, 33% last year and 49% this year.
He said that could be self-reinforcing, reflecting the nature of political debate about bringing migration numbers down.
The survey showed that levels of trust in government had shot up during the pandemic restrictions and stayed high for longer than in other parts of the world, but had now fallen back.
“We might be just returning to a historical norm of people just generally distrusting government,” O’Donnell said. “But perhaps there are lessons there for governments if they want.”
People under financial pressure were less likely than others to trust in government. Asked to rate their trust in a range of institutions and entities, respondents rated community and public service agencies above government and media. Social media companies were rated lowest.
Political participation was steady in 2024, with more than half (53%) saying they had signed a petition in the past year.
